Hi all, Happy Friday!

I just thought I'd share with you all something that happened a couple of weeks ago - we were contacted by a man who said he worked for a company called Maxhill Publishing that was organising charitable advertising for The Times & Sunday Times. He said that the newspaper had a summer charitable advertising programme and was looking for smaller charities to support in this way. The original price, for what he called a 'cheque book size' space in the paper was over £3,000. I said that as such a small charity we wouldn't be able to accommodate that kind of price, it was quickly bumped down to £600, which made me very suspicious. The man then said that another charity (that he named but I will keep anonymous) similar to ours had already signed up for the scheme and that he needed to know by the end of the day. 

This all rang a bell and I searched through my emails and saw that another 'representative' from Maxhill had been in touch a couple of years ago offering advertising space in a voucher booklet that was going to be in Good Housekeeping, Marie Claire, Elle, Red Magazine and more. They sent through a price list and PDF product brochure which looked like it had been made in Word in 2001, it was grainy and terrible quality, I realised a publishing company as big as the one looking after all of these magazines would be of a very high quality. I googled, saw the name of the actual company, which was Hearst Media, and called to check that this was their project - surprisingly, they had never heard of Maxhill publishing and quickly contacted the police. 

It was then to my surprise that they would attempt this again, within two years of their original 'pitch' to us. I googled Maxhill again, and saw an article in Third Sector about how Maxhill had scammed several charities out of thousands of pounds, never actually creating the adverts people had paid for. I contacted the Times, let them know what was happening, and they got their legal team involved immediately. I also got in touch with the other charity the man had named in his pitch to me and unfortunately, they had already paid £650 for advertising as they thought it was a genuine opportunity. I let the journalist from Third Sector know that this had happened again to try and spread the word within the charitable sector about this company and their scamming ways! She has written a follow up piece with lots of information here:

https://www.thirdsector.co.uk/company-selling-adverts-appeared-continues-target-charities/fundraising/article/1588171 

I have also informed the national advertising agency and the police to this situation, I hope this hasn't affected anyone else! I'd be interested to hear if anyone has had anything similar, and what measured you have in place to deter these kinds of solicitations? 

As a very small charity, we get a few of these kinds of things each year, most of them are much more obvious than this one, just spam emails and junk calls. This one however, the man was very convincing and persuasive, I could totally see why even big charities like the RNLI had been affected. 

Anyway, please share the story far and wide and hopefully they'll be stopped! 

Thanks, 

Emily :)